Forget about where the buses don’t run – I don’t even thing a cab would you to where this series hangs out.

I just don’t know…  Suspension of disbelief has never been my biggest criteria for fantasy anime.  I always consider it to be part of the package, but Karakuri Circus is really putting that to the test.  The saving grace so far has been that the characters have been pretty consistent – that’s more of a deal-breaker for me than far-fetched plot twists.  But I haven’t seen a lot of series throw out twists as numerous and frankly ridiculous as this one.

Things start out more or less reasonably by Karakuri standards.  Following the format employed by the last few episodes, we split our time between Narumi and the Shirogane-Masaru team, and this time it’s they who get the first turn in the saddle.  The ragtag Nakamichi brigade has earned almost enough money to start performing, and Shirogane puts them over the top by winning a beach beauty contest.  Vilma gives off hints that she was involved in a very bad relationship at some point, and tries to tease some personal detail out of Shirogane.  But she’s a woman without a lot of artifice, so that proves to be more or less a blind alley.

Meanwhile Narumi, along with Guy and Lucille, are on a plane headed for Shanghai to continue their mission.  But the plane is full of “self-destruct” automata – they explode if they’re stabbed or otherwise punctured – and they’re here to take out Team Narumi even if it means taking down the plane.  There’s a certain level of absurdity here, don’t get me wrong – the personalities of these automata are pretty over-the-top, and the whole but with Guy’s fingers was somewhere between gross and kind of hilarious.  Also, Narumi manages to draw a couple of more kids into his orbit – that seems to be his destiny.

But all that is really just the build-up, because things are about to get really silly.  After a major struggle on the inside and one on the outside of the plane that may or may not have taken out Guy (I kind of doubt it), Lucille announces from the cockpit (where she’s just wrested control from the automata that killed the flight crew) that the plane is about to crash.  And, apparently not being satisfied with having crashed a train into a circus where Shirogane was working, Karakuri Circus now crashes a plane into a circus where Shirogane is working.

I want to not be bothered by this as much as I am – I find this show to be genuinely exciting a lot of the time, and I quite like all three of the main characters (who have a brief reunion here, though Narumi clearly doesn’t remember who he’s just saved).  But come on – it’s not enough of a coincidence that the train happens to land right in the middle of Shirogane’s circus, an effing plane does too?  These crashes are wild and pretty preposterous to start with, but I could live with that if it weren’t paired with what seems to be some of the most ridiculous coincidence in shounen history.  I guess if stuff like that only amounts to an occasional irritant I can live with it, but I’d certainly feel a lot more committed to this show if it wasn’t weighed down by such nonsense.